Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 209
which many contemporary philosophers seem receptive, does to a large extent bear the
marks of the ‘violent god’ of the natural religions: “His transcendence, understood as
inaccessible for reason, as paradoxical and mysterious . . . .” In these theologies, there is
no positive expectation of the secular. Rather, it is a turn to a theology without incarnation
(Derrida, Levinas) and hence it can see secularization only as a regress, in which
one touches upon the radical transcendence of God whose Divinity consists only of his
being radically other. 169
For Vattimo, incarnation connects the reality of God and the world. The process of
secularization and the reality of incarnation are not identical, but have a ‘family resemblance’.
Secularization and the end of metaphysics are bound together in a historical
process in which there is no difference between world history and the history of salvation.
God is only knowable through the incarnation of Christ. Neither Bonhoeffer,
nor the other God-is-dead theologians have developed – to Vattimo’s mind – a positive
theory on how the death of the metaphysical God opens up a new perspective
for religion based on the doctrine of incarnation. In Vattimo’s reading of the death of
God, we find in the secular the achievement of religion. And in the secular we find
Gods revelation. Secularization is “the fulfillment of a history of salvation whose continuing
thread is from the beginning the death of God.” 170 A reemphasizing of God’s
radical transcendence would neglect this historical process. Vattimo rejects dialectical
theology, because it does the opposite of what he thinks secularization intends. What
Barth and Gogarten meant by secularization was that the divine was so transcendent
and ‘wholly other’ that it could not but leave the secular distinct from God and hence
autonomous. To Vattimo it is exactly its historical character that makes Christianity
compatible with a weak ontology. Revelation does not speak of objective truth, but
is an ongoing salvation. 171 Therefore, Vattimo can say that secularization is the very
essence of Christianity. This appreciation of Christianity’s inescapable embeddedness
in history is what separates Vattimo from dialectical theology:
If secularization is the essence of the history of salvation – that is, a transformation
that ‘reduces’ the metaphysical-natural sacred by virtue of God’s decision to institute a
relation of friendship with humanity (this is the meaning of Jesus’ incarnation) – then
one must oppose the unwarranted linkage of Christian doctrine with this or that given
historical reality with the most complete readiness to read the ‘signs of the times’, in
order that we may always identify ourselves anew with history by honestly recognizing
our own historicity. 172
The incarnation is a hermeneutical fact. In Vattimo the process of secularization is interpreted
as part of a greater historical process, in which two lines are converging: on
the one hand the end of metaphysics as analyzed by Heidegger, on the other the secularization
of the Christian West, which is not a decline of religion as such but a changed
Christianity in which the key concepts are maintained but no longer refer to the fixed
content of the history of salvation, rather these contents have really become part of
profane history. Consequently, Vattimo is reluctant of positions that use ‘the end of
metaphysics’ as an occasion to return to orthodoxy or kinds of fundamentalism. His
169 Vattimo, After Christianity, 43.
170 Vattimo, After Christianity, 42–3.
171 Vattimo, Belief, 48.
172 Vattimo, Belief, 53–4.